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30 June 2017

Out of the Stonewall
riots 27-30 June 1969 grew two pioneering trans organizations: Street
Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and Queens Liberation Front (QLF),
and two gay organizations Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Gay Activists Alliance
(GAA). Of course at that time ‘gay’ was the umbrella word that included
bisexuals and trans persons, but GAA and GLF were not usually focused on trans
issues.

There are already articles in this encyclopedia on the major persons in both
trans groups:

This article is about other trans persons who were around them, but of whom
there is insufficient information to do a full article, although in a few cases
a short article has been done. While I say trans, from the perspective of 2017,
most of them look more gender queer than transgender. Harry
Benjamin had been treating transsexuals in New York for many years, and had
published his definitive book in 1966, and Johns Hopkins had done a very few
transgender operations starting in the same year. There were cheaper doctors in
the New York: Leo
Wollman, David
Wesser, Benito
Rish, Felix
Shiffman, Peter
Fries. However to progress down the transsexual path required both money and
some degree of stability in life. Holly Woodlawn was given the money by her
boyfriend, but she quickly found that Johns Hopkins would require a multi-year
evaluation as well as the money. It was possible but not easy to go from selling
your body on 42nd Street to being a completed transsexual. Patricia
Morgan is a salutary example of how that could be done.

Some regard gender queer as second best to transsexual, but others regard it
as an equally valid identity or choice. The persons below didn’t use either of
these terms. They were homosexual, transvestite, drag queen, street queen etc.

How was the word ‘transvestite’ used? Here is Marsha P Johnson’ definition:
“A drag queen is one that usually goes to a ball, and that’s the only time she
gets dressed up. Transvestites live in drag. A transsexual spends most of her
life in drag. I never come out of drag to go anywhere. Everywhere I go I get all
dressed up. A transvestite is still like a boy, very manly looking, a feminine
boy. You wear drag here and there. When you’re a transsexual, you have hormone
treatments and you’re on your way to a sex change, and you never come out of
female clothes.” The QLF magazine was called Drag: a magazine about the
Transvestite.

Certainly this definition is radically different from the usage of Virginia
Prince, Ethel
Person and DSM III that attempted to limit the word to heterosexuals, and
even regarded transvestism as a type of fetishism.

The persons below are mentioned in the books about Stonewall, STAR, QLF etc,
but the pictures of them are far from complete. They are but snapshots, and in
almost all cases we do not know which of them lived only a few years more, which
of them lived a normal life expectancy, nor do we know if any of them later did
a successful transition.

Birdie Rivera

From the age of 11, Birdie
was the lover of a police officer who beat him and made him wear dresses. Birdy
and other gays at school formed a gang, the Commando Queens. They staked a claim
to Riker’s, a restaurant at Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue, which they
took over from the winos. He was active at Stonewall.

Carter: 59-60,167,177,179.
Cohen: 17.

Boom Boom Santiago

Boom Boom was one of the street transvestites whom Bob Kohler brought to the
early GLF meetings (1969). “Here are the people that you’re supposed to be
helping. Meanwhile they’re starving, they’re dying, they have no clothes, they
have no food. They’re the ones who started the goddamn [Stonewall] riot”.
Kohler’s appeal was actually met with hostility.

Cohen: 99

Chris Thompson

Chris was a dancer, and aspired to be a dance therapist. Chris was also
black, gay, trans and asthmatic. She sought treatment for asthma at New York’s
Bellevue Hospital in 1970, but was locked in the psychiatric wing. She was
ridiculed by the staff for sexual and gender deviance, and was threatened with
transfer to the state mental hospital, but was quite accepted by the other
patients. Arthur Bell
& Sylvia Rivera discovered her and were able to do an interview. “When I
came into admitting office, I told the doctor I had congestion and asthma.
Because of me wanting to be a woman so much, he asked me did I ever have a fear
of cutting my penis off. I didn’t tell him one way or the other, but on my
record they have it down that I have a fear of cutting my penis off, to become a
woman. I want to become a woman that bad, so they asked me these questions — do
I still have a fear of taking a razor and cutting my penis off and I told them
no, and if I did decide to have a sex change I would go through the legal
procedures and go to the proper physicians and have it done.”

Christine

Christine was described as a ‘hard old queen’. She was once bailed by Bob
Kohler, the GLF activist.

Cohen : 98.

Congo Woman

Congo was regarded as ‘nasty’. She used to throw a brick though a display
window to grab a dress or a wig.

Carter: 56

Ivan Valentin

Ivan, also Hispanic, was a friend of Sylvia from 1966, and also a friend of
Ed Murphy of the Stonewall Inn. He is quoted: “A drag or transvestite is
somebody who always dresses as a woman. A female impersonator is someone who
claims to actually be a woman. I’m just a man who likes to dress up.”

Ivan was at the first night of the Stonewall riot where he was hit in the
knee by a policeman’s billy club, and had ten stitches at St Vincent’s Hospital.
He credits Sylvia with jumping a cop and starting the Stonewall riot – however
he is alone in this claim.

Ivan later headlined a drag troupe “Leading Ladies of New York”. This show
was shut down in Spring 1975 in West
Hartford by the Connecticut state liquor authorities. Valentin took the case
to the University of Connecticut School of Law, and got the law changed.

Josie

A friend of Sylvia’s from the mid-1960s. When Sylvia first went to a GAA
meeting, it was Josie who went with her.

Duberman : 235,
Cohen: 102, 109

Lola Montez

Listed, but no further details.

Cohen : 99,

Michele

Michele, 3rd from left, at Stonewall

Listed but no further details.

Cohen : 99

Nelly

Also known as Betsy Mae Kulo, a young Latina, who passed very easily.

Carter : 56

Orphan Annie

With white skin, a red afro and prominant eyes, Annie was said to resemble
the comic-strip character. She had a habit when in cheap hotels of throwing
radios or lamps out of the window. It was apparently Annie, giving out GLF
leaflets in Greenwich Village, who gave one to Arthur Evans and his lover Arthur
Bell – which brought them into the group.

A character in the 2015 Stonewall film was given this name.

Carter : 56, 60, 227
Cohen : 99, 101

Miss Pixie

Miss Pixie lived in STAR House. She was at the March 10, 1972 conference on
transvestism attended by STAR, QLF and GAA.

Cohen : 91, 132, 145.

Raquel Wilson

Raquel was known as the ‘queen of sex’.

Cohen: 99.

Stanley

Despite her name, Stanley was always in drag, and given to claims
such as that she had attended a famous school, which she would not name.

Carter: 56.

Wanda/cross-eyed Cynthia

She was pushed out of a window of the St George Hotel in Brooklyn. More.

Carter: 56, 60 refers to a cross-eyed Sylvia, who would liberate hotel
curtains to make dresses, and who fell from the roof of the St George Hotel.

Zazu Nova

Zazu
was from upstate New York, and a staunch Unitarian. She had a violent temper and
had been in prison more than once. It was rumored that she had done time for
murder. She often carried a large chain in her purse for self-defense.

Cohen p48

David Carter writes of the Stonewall riots: “we can name three individuals
known to have been in the vanguard: Jackie Hormona, Marsha Johnson and Zazu
Nova”.

Nova was active in Gay Youth and GLF – she wrote for GLF News. Cohen
quotes Perry Brass: “the divine Nova, a great transgendered creature whom I
adored back then: totally original young man, who was maybe 19 or 20, and
gorgeous, I mean Fab-u-lasss in the most intense way. I have no idea what
happened to him (or her, in the more pc language). Nova was not strictly
speaking a “she.” He often dressed as much young male as female. But he was a
great dancer, and I can still hear his voice and the way he spoke—hugely poetic,
outrageous, and very sweet. He was tall, about 6’, and looked wonderful.” She
disappeared a few years after GLF folded.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.